There’s another town on a hill that would never have been there except for mining, and my relationship with it goes back much further into my past. I was first there when I was eight, and after I got a driver’s license and a raw set of wheels, the winding two-lane down and up to it was pretty much my favorite day trip.

Like many official names, the name for this one is prosaic and wrong. We already have SandRock and Prettytown on the list of alternative namings. Add Wicked City, which is an epithet they push now for marketing to tourists, but it works, too. We were there today. We ate at a restaurant called The Bordello. We shopped briefly at the House of Joy, which was a whorehouse and then a cool fun cluttered store, and is now just another overpriced gallery.

From Wicked City’s dusty sacred hillside, you can see the true Peaks, and the one Rim.

We stayed at the bottom of the hill though this time, down by the train, because it cost less. Which brings us to the problematic aspects of the place and it’s environs.

The Vaiirde Valley region is absolutely perfect from the point of view of how the geography makes me feel.

But unlike the target town on the NewMejican side, there’s no 4+ year college here, and in fact only tiny branch campuses of a two-year. This is a lacking, on the cultural, non-geographical side.

Even more important, it’s been fucked by its close proximity to a hellfire megalopolis, and the millions of blighted denizens who live there seeking to get out of it whenever they can. Which in turn drives up real estate prices, well past the sensible point.

Call someplace paradise and kiss it goodbye. So I will refrain, from calling my much more remote NM town anything like paradisaical, and only say that for many reasons it has been where my heart has been pointed instead, lo these twenty-five years.